Shadow industry minister Andrew Hastie says Australia risks becoming a 'supplicant state' to whichever superpower wins the artificial intelligence race, just as it accepted dependency on the US nuclear umbrella last century, and is pitching an AI ambassador and an education…
The Australian centre-right Liberal Party used its annual Tom Hughes Oration in Sydney on Monday to argue that artificial intelligence is the next strategic test of national sovereignty, with shadow industry minister Andrew Hastie warning the country risks becoming a "supplicant state" to whichever superpower wins the technology race.
Hastie, who holds the shadow portfolio for industry and sovereign capability, framed AI in terms borrowed from the Cold War nuclear contest. Australia "missed the opportunity to become a nuclear power" in the twentieth century, he said, and now faces a second such moment. If it does not build domestic AI capacity, "sovereignty and strategic independence will be further constrained by the AI superpowers reshaping the global order," according to The Guardian Australia's report of the speech.
The proposals on offer are concrete. Hastie called for a dramatic scaling of Australian AI investment, the appointment of a new AI ambassador, and an overhaul of the education system "so we can unleash Australian hearts and minds on AI." The address, hosted by colleague Julian Leeser, is one of the Liberal Party's most prestigious annual platforms, and the choice of AI as its subject signals that the technology has moved from a sub-folder of industry policy to a central organising question for the opposition.
The strategic frame is the squeeze. Australia is bound to the United States by its closest security alliance and to China by its largest trade relationship, and AI sits at the intersection of both. Hastie named Anthropic, Google, Meta and OpenAI as the US companies engaged in a "growing arms race" and criticised "techbros" in Silicon Valley for the influence they now hold inside the Trump administration and for resisting new AI regulation. He also said Australia "won't be able to escape" a hot US–China conflict over AI dominance and advanced chips centred on Taiwan, and warned of large-scale job displacement, "social upheaval," and "revolt" if AI strips workers of meaningful employment.
That is the policy ambition. The harder question is feasibility. Sovereign AI capacity at any meaningful scale requires three things: compute infrastructure in the form of data centres, accelerators, and power; semiconductor access to the advanced chips at the centre of the US–China contest; and the talent to design, train, and deploy frontier models. Australia has the National AI Centre, CSIRO's Data61, and a small but credible research base, but it does not have a domestic frontier-model lab of the scale of OpenAI or Anthropic, and it does not have advanced chip fabrication capacity to build one. The capital cost of standing up a competitive sovereign AI stack, against a federal government that has just replaced a guardrail-leaning industry minister with a "lighter touch" successor in Tim Ayres after Ed Husic was dumped from cabinet in 2025, is the question the address does not answer.
The political context is not incidental. Hastie is widely regarded as a future Liberal leader; he chose not to challenge Sussan Ley in January before Angus Taylor deposed her. A Resolve Strategic poll published in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald on the same day as the oration put the Coalition primary vote at a record-low 20%, behind Labor on 28% and One Nation on 29%. The address is therefore both a policy document and a positioning move, and the analogy itself has limits a reader should hold in mind. AI is commercial, diffuse, and already global, unlike nuclear weapons, which were a state monopoly, technical in the extreme, and countable. Treating AI as the next Manhattan Project risks understating the private-sector dynamics that already shape the field and overstating the leverage a mid-sized ally can expect to extract from picking a side.
The watch item is whether the Liberal Party's "sovereignty" framing survives contact with the practical question it raises. The diagnosis of dependency, the proposal for an AI ambassador, and the choice of AI as the Tom Hughes topic are all on the table. Whether Australia can build the compute, the chips, and the talent to make the analogy a warning rather than a prophecy is the part of the speech that will need to be tested in policy, not in oratory.